Dead.... Sad .... Whales ..

The US NAVY, Australian Navy and New Zealand Navy are conducting a RIMPAC type #underwater #electronic #weapons testing with Raytheon right where these whales died! these very dangerous underwater electronic weapons also kill #coral #reefs like what happened in Kauai and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The corals can not simply swim away from the submarines bombarding their habitat with electricity!!

So, ok i take it that D* is a** whole lot** lighter on energy consumption than, say, Facebook etc

Uh, no?

In reality, this thread here is a bit like comparing taking a ride in a private jet vs. catching a train. Sure, if we only compare absolute numbers, then yes, diaspora consumes less energy than Facebook does, but if we compare the relative energy usage per users? Well, not even close.

I know that some "Facebook alternatives" market themselves as great "green" alternatives, but that's all marketing woo-woo. The reality is: Federated systems (not just diaspora, and in fact, not just federated social networks) make no ecological or economic sense, as the very model they are designed on makes it impossible for those systems to be efficient in any meaning of the word.

Let's look at how Facebook works first. They operate in about 11 datacenters, some of them in strategic locations that allows cooling with ambient air or natural water to reduce the energy required for cooling. They spin customized hardware, including using specialized GPU boards to run certain aspects of the calculation, a bit comparable to the custom FPGAs Google users to process video. They build these appliances to achieve the highest possible performance, which allows them to handle more tasks on one given node and thus keep the total number of nodes as low as possible. Estimating 2.5 billion monthly active users, this turns out to be roughly 227 million users per datacenter (yes, reality doesn't work that way, but let's just roll with that for now). I don't know the actual size of those data centers, let alone the number of machines in it, but there is only so much space you can use, so it's safe to assume they are using their resources to their fullest. All Facebook datacenters built in the last couple of years use 100% renewable energy sources, and some of the newest DCs even leverage a system to turn their hot cooling liquid to heat up nearby cities, which you can't really beat in terms of sustainability.

Now, let's look at diaspora. Contrary to Facebook, we don't do the processing in a few central datacenters, but we ask everyone to set up their own node. That's great for control and privacy, but horrible in every other sense. Even densely packed, large nodes like the one I maintain (Geraspora) operate leveraging roughly a third of the available resources most of the time. And they have to because there needs to be a fair bit of margin whenever there is a peak of users (like on Saturday evening), or just a processing heavy task like someone exporting their profile. However, when there is no such task, the machine effectively idles with 60% of its resources. Granted, CPUs can scale down, and PSUs also reduce their output a bit, they still use quite a substantial amount of power and are ultimately less efficient systems then they could be at 100% load. Contrary to large-scale systems (my favorite example here is Google, using idling Ad servers to render YouTube videos), I don't have anything else to process on that servers during the idle time, because I can't really ask smallpod.example.com to hand over some user data so that I can deliver their streams, so these CPU cycles to go waste.

Most diaspora podmins are private people without a large budget to spend on server hardware and co-location racks, so they rent their servers from hosters like Hetzner. While those hosters are cheap, they don't sell you actual server hardware, but rather PCs (don't believe me? Look at this frame, taken out of

Hetzner Data Centre TourdeHetzner - Trusted in HostingaYouTube), resulting in even less efficient design. Desktop CPUs are not designed for constant workloads, and ATX cases are not designed for the most efficient cooling when stacked. PC hardware is generally not built for data center use, and there tends to be a high rate of hardware failure, resulting in more hardware replacements, creating more waste. So even if we could leverage all available resources somehow, or if we assume podmins use the free resources for other projects, it'd still be a far less efficient system than any actual server could be.

One could argue that diaspora is still more efficient as we don't do complex computations for content recommendation etc., but I hardly believe this holds any merit. The thing is... yes, Facebook is doing more things, but they can't leverage magic spells either, so those complex computations have to be efficient. That's the reason Facebook spins custom boards and custom chips because, at the end of the day, there are only so many cycles you can spend per user to avoid the system getting backlogged forever. I firmly believe that even Facebooks complex calculations use less actual power per user than diaspora serving a single user stream.

However, that's just my experience from working with large-scale messaging systems, and there is no way to prove that, so let's skip that and look at something else. If someone posts a thing on Facebook and it would be scheduled to be delivered to everyone in the network, Facebook would, effectively, only have to transmit that item to 10 other datacenters. With diaspora, ... not so much. Even as of right now, Geraspora would attempt to deliver a post to more than 400 nodes, spawning a connection for every single one of them, doing TLS handshakes, ... we don't have to get down to protocol implementations to realize that we create a lot of overhead, both concerning computation for cryptography, and concerning actual network usage.

So, uh, if you want to use social network with the smallest footprint on the environment, well, go and use Facebook.

#hm.. once got a ride from Vienna to Hamburg in such #BMW 2002tii... me first wife et moi were hiichhiking up to Norway; da guy driving was a journalist working on an article about bad driving on highways... he did the most crazy turns and takeovers, all totElly illegal and, much over the speed limit in Austria, Germany has none... so we were racing whitefaced up direction north sea... can't remember much of dat ride only, both of us got out da car white as a wall. da can was lowered so ya had da feeling of sitting on the road

Bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) is a species of humming bird. It is the world’s smallest bird. Male Bee hummingbirds are 57mm(2.24in) in length, half of the length is of it’s tail, and weighs about 1.6g. Female Bee hummingbirds are slightly larger and weighter than male’s. They are found mostly in Cuba and the Isle of Youth.

.. Wah, still going on and getting worse ..

Since 2007, at least 600 people have lost their lives in attacks by wild animals in Uttarakhand, while as many as 3,100 people have reported receiving injuries in such attacks. Official records show 166 leopards and 16 tigers have been declared man-eaters in the past 15 years.

!Hubzilla Support ForumI am tried to connect Friendica network on Osada. But the connection status shows me a rss/atom protocol for Friendica.Is this default behavior? Or I am entering the Friendica link wrong in add connection?

Yes and no. The capability used to exist, but I went looking for a way to enable it the other day and some important chunks have been removed from the code since we nixed the (shitty) UI for this feature in 2012 and left it for "experimental use". The DB structure and most of the backend support is still there, but the conversation templates would need a bit or work. This doesn't require a rocket scientist to bring back, but it will require perseverance.

Changes in the upcoming Hubzilla 3.8 releaseAs you have probably already noticed, there were some dramatic changes to the settings and app infrastructure in the 3.7 development cycle.

What changed?

We left behind the central settings page a.k.a Settings > Additional Features in favor of per app settings pages. Basically every app with settings has an easy accessible (cog icon next to the app name in the panel) settings page.

Some features have been transformed into stand-alone apps. Privacy Groups, Wiki, Notes come to my mind. There are many others though. If you had one of the transformed features enabled, you will now need to install its app equivalent. E.G. you will need to install the Privacy Groups App to be able to manage your privacy groups.

Addons:

Some addons have already been ported to the new app infrastructure (all the federation protocols, n_s_f_w, startpage, etc). The remaining will be ported in the next release cycle.Basically here applies the same as explained above for the core apps. If you had an addon enabled in the addon settings, you will need to install its equivalent app (diaspora app, n_s_f_w app, etc).

Summary of needed actions for the channel owner:

If you had features/addons enabled that have been "appified" you will need to install the equivalent apps for the channel.

Click "Add Apps" from the navbar hamburger menu to see an overview of your installed apps

To install a new app, select "Available Apps" from the left-aside Apps Collections menu

Most of what were called, "Features," were just apps/addons that had been integrated into the core. This caused confusion. The decision was made to move to a consistent user experience.

Whether it's a "feature" or an "addon" - doesn't really matter from an end-user perspective. If it's something that users can turn on/off or in some way be configured - the UI is now consistent (or will be). There aren't 2 different places to look for stuff any more, and now hub members don't have to keep track of the difference between "Features" and "Addons". Which is just as well, because they shouldn't have to care that there's a difference.

I found an interesting channel where, despite being authenticated via Magicauth, I did not get the option to comment on posts directly.So I wrote my own post as a kind of reply, adressing the channel that I wanted to interact with. But seems like this does not work (see errormessage in the image), probably until the channel owner accepts my connection request?

Question: is my understanding correct? And what setting on a channel is responsive for that? Just in case I want the same behavior for myself - or want to disable it.

#Osada package for #Yunohost is available now. Yunohost gives ability to install,update,backup and restore the app on a single click, thus easing down the installation and maintenance process. The package is multi-instance,so there can be multiple Osada running on a single machine.

It should probably be set before the setup actually runs and sets up the database and everything else. I don't have time to look, but my guess based on what I've been able to find so far, it looks like there is at least the possibility that the installation proceeds a little differently if NOMADIC is set. So to make sure everything happens that needs to, I would make sure to set NOMADIC before actually doing the installation.

I'll tag @Mike Macgirvin in case he has a comment, but if you proceed under the assumption that it is needed before setup, things should be fine.

!Hubzilla Support ForumHi I tried to install Osada same way as Hubzilla but I can only see the main page with huge interface. What ever link I click it redirects to to this main page. I am using nginx and Ldap plugin. Is the installation step of the Osada differ from the Hubzilla installation?

If you have checked out the code using git, you can simply do a cd hubzilla_dir && git describe --tags HEAD.

$ git describe --tags HEAD3.8.2

If you're not exactly on the tagged release, it will also print the number of commits after the previous tag as well as the short hash of the commit. Like below illustrated by describing the commit before HEAD.

I frequently use NGINX rate limiting as a first line of defense. I've thought about 2FA, but if it is done over SMS, I find that it is technically less securen than most standard passwords (assuming isers choose good passwords)

I haven't (yet) implemented it on Hubzilla, but expect I will have a need. From a quick glance, it appears it will require compiling nginx with the form input module - which is already included in the OpenResty package.

Protect your applications from excessive traffic, including DDoS attacks, by controlling the requests they receive with NGINX rate limiting.

I use Yunohost which is Debian 9 based. I have enabled the Ldap plugin which lets all the Ldap user able to login and have there accounts despite of registration closed on my hub.I will try to use the fail2ban configuration without the Ldap plugin to see if it works.

I wrote a yubikey addin a few years ago. (Non nomadic) It would be good to have a FreeOTP plugin. I'm not sure these would work well with a nomadic identity though. It could be done i suppose. FreeOTP is kind of like a hash based on your secret that is only valid for a limited amount of time. Both endpoints need the secret, but they don't have to talk to each other. It would require running a FreeOTP cli on the server, which would complicate things. Yubikey is like a 12 digit serial number and a hash based on the serial, which also is only valid for a limited time. So the 12 digit serial would be like a username. Its hardcoded on the device. To validate the hash you have to run a validation server or use theirs.

@Waitman GobbleYes I have FreeOTP would be great for the Hubzilla.Meanwhile the Fail2ban works for IPv6 now. I was using old version for Fail2ban which is available on Debain 9. The latest version of Fail2ban deals with IPv6 well.

@Waitman Gobble As an owner of an Yubikey I would like to ask you nicely for the code.From my perspective the OTP should be bound to the account for login and not to the channel.So the account isn't part of the nomdic feature.

And I suspect the project don't even get 1% of this. This would be the case with all good open source projects. To add salt to injuries the coders are asked whats the use of this when you have free professional service.